


【English Version】The World Ends...Not with a Bang

by tomatopea



Category: Person of Interest (TV), Westworld (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23785387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomatopea/pseuds/tomatopea
Summary: Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaningless【This is a rough translation  (emphasize on rough ;))  of my previous piece  (originally written in Chinese).  】
Relationships: Root | Samantha Groves & Sameen Shaw, Root | Samantha Groves/Sameen Shaw, Samaritan/Sameen Shaw
Kudos: 8





	【English Version】The World Ends...Not with a Bang

Sameen Shaw walked down the street with a dog in tow. The streets were swarmed with people, just like every normal Wednesday morning. She was in a trance for a moment, thinking that behind the next corner, in the next car, among the next group of chatting Asian tourists, there would be hidden faces that she was so familiar with. She shook her head to dispel the illusion, no way, everyone was dead.

Well, maybe not everyone. Detective Fusco was still alive with a hippie smile, not even sacked for a bunch of harebrained moves. Bear following her was also full of energy, one could say slightly healthier than before. But everyone else died. She had heard absolutely nothing from Finch or Reese after that day, "No news is no news," that scruffy detective's thirst for comforting was interrupted by her indifference. Why can’t that guy understand? Are there any other possibilities left?

And the other person, the other person who’s more special to her, was long gone.

While she was thinking of THAT PERSON, the red phone booth in the corner rang. Is it from that person? Is it from the machine? With a slight slice of hope, she walked over to pick it up, only to hear a nightmarish voice coming through: “Ms. Shaw, how do you like this simulation?"

2

"...SIMULATION?" she woke up struggling on bed, thirsty, dizzy, barely able to make out the last word of that sentence.

"Yes, my dear," Greer grinned at her while he was playing a clip of her memory on the screen, “that touching smile you got looking towards the phone booth was so sweet, I couldn't even bear to end such a beautiful simulation. But what can I say, time is running out, and we need to get ready to enter the real world."

Shaw was in a state of confusion. She tried to sit up, only to find her arms and legs bound on the bed. "What simulation? We have won, we have destroyed Samaritan".

Greer sighed and walked over, holding his fingers gently, like a professor who’s giving an introductory course to freshmen. “Yes, you killed yourself in 6741 simulations, then you were stopped by Ms. Groves, and finally destroyed us along with her and your little squad…. But,” he now waved his hand earnestly like a professor who was somewhat disappointed in the freshman's question, “you were an excellent agent, one of our bests, have you forgotten how agents obtained information from their captives? The rolling eyeballs when one sees a particular scene, the rising heartbeats when one hears certain keyword… you see, we don’t need you to lead the way at all, we already determined the location of your squad's base during the first few simulations. ”

"You...we..." Shaw opened her mouth but didn't know what to ask.

Yet Greer seemed to catch what she hadn’t asked. He turned back to the screen and said, “Those following simulations, well, those thousands of simulations were just to give us an idea of people like you.” He paused, "Heroists, idealists, call yourselves whatever you want. We just want to know what people like you would choose to do."

“The outcome is not difficult to predict, you are too eager to destroy your enemy, too unafraid of the death of your own or even your companions, that’s why your kind can only see, oh no, can only wish for the end of perishing together with us. ” The screen paused at the moment when that missile hit that rooftop, Greer opened his arms widely and made an exaggerated gesture of explosion, “Bang! And everything is over”.

"But my dear Sameen", he quickly calmed down from his own dramatization and slowly paced back to the bedside, “you see, the world ends...not with a bang, frankly speaking, it never ever ends with a 'bang'. Your machine could have evolved itself to the point it is today in isolation from its creator, have you ever wondered, then, that our Samaritan, developed and maintained by so many talents, could possibly remain the same as you knew of? ”

A hint of coldness permeated Shaw's ridge, perhaps the bed was too cold, perhaps the ceiling above was leaking. But before she could look up to see the ceiling, Greer leaned over and whispered:

“We already built a new system that is born out of Samaritan, but far more omnipotent and versatile. It can determine everyone’s fate, from life to death, from growth to depravity. And it can control every single part of our world, the financial statements of publicly traded companies, the way those poets lamenting at sunset, you name it. It is the real future. As for Samaritan, Samaritan is now no more than a decayed empty shell left behind by a snake after it shed its skin. We are just using it to sweep you all off your feet before we fully operationalize the new system in a brand new, undisturbed world ”

“Let the ‘humans’ burn each other to death, the ‘King’ will descend upon the land after all flames burned out. His name is *&%^$^. Unfortunately, a good soldier shall never go into a battle with any memory that would slow her down.I will use drugs to eliminate this conversation from your memory and put you to sleep again. Then you can break free out of our men as you did in the last simulation, join your squad, and give everything to the ‘victory’ you desire. I wish you the best, Shaw.”

3

Shaw's mind was suddenly pulled back into her body, she even swayed slightly from the impact, thankfully she can lean against the car.

The car?

She found herself crouching behind a car with a loaded gun. The car was constantly hit by bullets from the other side, vibrating slightly and making a metallic buzzing sound. The person crouched here with her was Root, who’s now talking to her with a smile that was only appropriate during a picnic in the countryside:“ ...If we're just information, just noise in the system, we might as well be a...”

" Symphony! " Shaw blurted out, wondering how she could finish this strange flirtation accurately. She then sensed a familiarity in the current scene, as if it was really a rehearsed symphony. 

Rehearsed, performance, climax, ending, preset, preset ending.

"The world ends...not with a bang," Shaw mumbled. It seems to be an important sentence. Where did she hear it from? 

Root didn’t catch Shaw’s words clearly. She moved a bit, leaning forward with her fingertips against the car, face approaching Shaw's murmuring lips, curved hair lingering through her thick eyelashes, the tip of her nose almost touching Shaw's slightly heating cheek. 

"The world ends not with a bang", Shaw was still mumbling to herself, completely failed to notice the overly intimate closeness.

Root couldn't help but laugh dumbly, "What is it, sweetie? Are you getting back at me for picking a bad time to flirt? So you decided to pick a worse time to recite T.S. Eliot's poem?" However, she soon realized that something was wrong, as Shaw kept repeating those words, becoming more and more frightened and even holding her head in her gun-clutching hands, trembling. 

"Sameen!", the gunshots from the other side were denser and closer, without any time left to ask more questions, Root patted Shaw heavily on her shoulder with one hand and quickly stood up to shoot back. 

Shaw’s trembling was stopped by that pat. With Root’s hand moving up, Shaw glanced up and saw Root’s face in the sunlight, her determined face with a fearless and death-defying look.

Death-defying? Is she going to die?

That extremely painful thought pricked its way into her deeply buried memory. Shaw screamed: "Rehoboam!!!"

Root, in the middle of a fierce battle, was distracted by that scream and got hit on her shoulder. Drops of blood splattered the air. In Shaw's eyes, Root’s blood splattered almost the entire sky she could see, foreshadowing the cruel fate that would follow.

"Root! They've got a new system Rehoboam. Samaritan is just a bait, you will..."

Root will die. Root must not die. All the memory clips from her last simulation surfaced in her mind. Hastily explaining the whole thing, Shaw stood up without hesitation to drag Root back down.

Someone fired a shot.

At that moment, the sunshine, the sky, the close dense gunfires, and the terrible shriek coming out of Root’s mouth all seemed to be far away from her.

A few milliseconds before that bullet grazed the car and travelled through her head, her last thought came back to the night when she heard about Root’s death. 

There was…

Whimper,

That's how the world ended.

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes are from "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot


End file.
